Episode 227 of Mastering Dungeons! Main topic: Forgotten Realms Unearthed Arcana! New subclasses are out for playtest feedback and will be part of the Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide out this November. We take a look at playtesting and the first two subclasses for Bard and Cleric. News: D&D Movie Licensing, New D&D Books and Settings, Sigil VTT Changes, and more! Contents 00:00 Winter Fantasy Cometh 02:57 What RPG Jobs Do? 20:36 Running Interesting NPCs? 28:33 D&D Movie and TV Licensing 34:10 Battlemarked Game 35:05 New D&D Books Announced - Eberron 38:59 Dragon Delves and Borderlands Starter 40:18 FR Player's and Adventure Guide 41:10 New Settings Coming 42:20 Sigil VTT Changes 45:05 New Fallbacks Novel 45:27 Universal D&D Fan Fest Tickets Available 46:01 Ethan Yen Launches PREQUEL 47:39 Punch Nazis on Bundle of Holding 48:25 Jared Rascher Hangs Up Review Hat 49:34 Brandon Sanderson Lectures 50:25 New Unearthed Arcana 52:09 What is Helpful Feedback? 01:03:44 Bard College of the Moon Concept 01:06:24 Bard Subclass Benefits 01:20:10 Cleric Knowledge Domain 01:32:42 Shout-Outs Thank you for listening! Get the full show notes with links on Patreon. Show Search Engine: https://mdsearch.alphastream.org/ Our intro and outro music is Metropolis Fanfare, provided royalty-free by Tabletop Audio (https://tabletopaudio.com) under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). MP3 file metadata populated with Online MP3 Podcast Chapter Editor, built by Dominik Peters. https://mp3chapters.github.io/ and customized for Mastering Dungeons by Vladimir Prenner from Croatia.
Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Mastering Dungeons, your favorite role-playing tabletop game news design stuff stuff. I'm Sean Merwin here with Teos Abadieh. Hey, Teos, how's it going?
It's going great because this weekend brought victory of Duke over the Tar Heels, our hated rivals. I mean, not really. My best friend goes there. But anyway, you know, it was a big game. We dominated. It was great. And so this Mike Shea segment, I just want to say, go Duke. And then I got the new Monster Manual.
And the other cover showing off covers is like the new influencer thing where you show off your Lamborghini and champagne. And I said, boy, I wish those things cost what a monster manual costs. But I'm glad to show them off. They're cool. I like them.
I have no Monster Manual to show off, no Lamborghini, no champagne, but I do have a podcast. And this podcast, its two hosts are going to win a fantasy. I leave... Although there's a recording in two days or the day of the recording, when it drops, I will be on the road. So hopefully we will see some folks, some listeners there. And when we come back, I'm sure we will have tales to tell.
Yeah, I had some flakes this morning. In fact, just like 20 minutes ago. And so I think it's telling me that it's the time to migrate to winter fantasy for tons and tons of gaming. I'm excited to play a bunch of Dragonlance. And then... some Grim Hollow. Ooh.
Ooh, yes. A couple of Grim Hollow preview adventures will be there. One regular adventure and one epic. So I'm looking forward to seeing how those go. I apparently will be overseeing the running of the epic, which happens twice. So looking forward to doing that along with my friend and co-conspirator on that, Joe Rosso. And we'll talk more about it when we get back.
We'll have much more to say, but safe travels to everybody heading to lovely Fort Wayne, Indiana in February. Shouldn't be terrible. Maybe a little icy at times because it's right at that wrong temperature. But we'll see.
Yeah, I don't see snow in the forecast. So that's that's something.
Yeah. And someone what else we'll see there hopefully are some listeners and listeners have been sending their stuff to us. So here we go with our listener corner, starting with Tim Hibbets via our Patreon. Hi, I was hoping you'd cover these in the TTRPG career section, but I would love to know the details of what a TTRPG editor and art director really do. Thanks.
So we've talked about the industry before. And so I think this is what Tim is referring to. And we may have done a little bit of glossing over. So let's take a moment to step through some of these positions, talk about what they do and how it may differ from company to company, or project to project. Sound good?
Yeah, I love it.
Okay, here we go. So let's take a sort of larger company, we'll say a medium-sized company that works on projects that involve publishing multiple books at one time. So we'll go kind of large here to cover the full range. I'll do this sort of like a process. So when the book is being created, there's a bunch of planning that goes on, obviously. And then the writing begins.
So let's start with when the writing begins. The writing begins with the designers. The designers are the people who do the writing on the book. That design may be rules. It could be lore. It could be narrative. It could be adventures. But that one term designer covers a lot of things. If you are doing a large book, you may have multiple designers working on the book.
So therefore, there will be a lead designer. The lead designer stands in for all of the other designers in this process and collects the designer's work when they're done and hopefully will review it and make sure it's good before it goes on to the next step in the process. Now, the lead designer may be a designer who does part of the book and then collects the others.
It may be somebody who doesn't actually do the design of the original, but takes it in and covers the the text that comes in.
Make sure it meets those standards and approaches that the company uses, yeah.
Exactly, exactly. Now, sometimes a company or a project may differentiate between a designer and a writer. Whereas a designer will be the one designing rules, the writer may be doing the text that's adventure design, narrative design, and so on. Sometimes there's a differentiation, sometimes there's not.
But if there are many writers, then there may be a lead writer who acts the same way that a lead designer would only for the writing. Cool. So we've got text coming in. Once that text gets in and it passes through all the design team, it will often go to a developer.
The difference between those is the designer is doing the initial writing and the developer is taking it and looking at it, generally looking at it in terms of rules. So they're generally looking to make sure that the design of the rules or the design of the content that touches the rules works for what this project is meant to do.
Yeah, I would take it a step further that you can have development on something like adventures and then you're looking at it again, kind of like you're saying, it's not the micro of this sentence, but more like you were trying to, let's say something like you were trying to create an adventure that was about the apocalypse, but the apocalypse ended halfway through the adventure.
Is that really what you're trying to do here? Maybe we need to rethink this. You're kind of done halfway through. Maybe we should work on this a bit and refine it.
Right. For sure. So in any of these, there may be overlap. There may be something missing. But that's generally what a developer does. So the developer takes it, looks at it. If the development of it meets the criteria, doesn't meet the criteria, they will hand it back to the design team. If it's okay, if it's good enough to go along, then it generally passes on to an editor.
Now you may have a lead developer, again, who takes all the development from a team, puts it into one pile and goes over it, but it will then go to an editor. So the editor will then review it in whatever terms that editor has been told to review. Sometimes there is no developer. The editor will act as a developer.
Sometimes if there has been a development pass done on it, the editor will just edit it for grammar, for readability, for clarity, and so on. If there are many editors working on a book, There may be a lead editor who takes the work from all the different editors into one pile and then make sure those editors did what they were supposed to do with the text.
So that's the three steps I sort of came up through the industry learning about.
And that editing can be very like all you do is grammar or all you do is look at the overall flow of things. It can really vary. But often for major companies, it is still one or two people who are doing it. And I'll say one of the tricks here is doing things in the right process, right?
Because if, for example, you suddenly have someone step in, even if they're not the developer, but act like the developer after it's been edited and make a bunch of changes. Now it has to go back to editing, right? And similarly, if a writer were to come in and do something, but it hasn't been developed, then it might not be upholding the vision of that product anymore.
And it really needs to be developed and edited. And so if you think of various cases where we've had, like, how did this end up happening in a book? This thing shouldn't have been here. It's problematic content or any number of issues. Well, probably those steps were skipped or jumbled up.
Yep. I'm going to throw in now a term called producer. I could as easily say project manager here because generally a producer's job is to possibly take on some of the other roles on a smaller project, but they are the ones that make sure the text is getting completed on time and on budget. Sometimes you'll hear the term managing editor, which throws another level of confusion in it.
But in my experience, the managing editor is generally more in the producer role than an editor role, although they may have some editing responsibilities as well. I will also throw in here something like consultant, sensitivity reader, that sort of thing. They take on more of an editor role, but on a very specific basis. They are not generally looking at grammar. They are not looking at rules.
They are not looking at that. They are looking in that area of their own expertise, which is whatever topic that they are an expert in. So now we've got hopefully a text that has been written, developed, edited, and then off to the side sometimes is the art director. And it's not like the art director steps in now.
The art director will be working alongside this whole process to act as a liaison between the production team and the artists that are creating the art for the project. Most of the project I've worked at, the art director has gotten a look at the manuscript along the way. Sometimes they read pieces of the manuscript to pull out a
text that will act as an art order, or they will create an art order based on that text. Sometimes they will wait for an art order to be created by someone in the process, whether that's a writer or a designer or a developer or an editor. And often it happens all along the way where we will have, okay, we need this amount of art to start with. Good, we've got that done.
Now we'll get some art here. All right, now we're going, now the text is done, give me some more so I can get more art in.
Yeah, and that process between art director and project manager is really critical the bigger you get, right? And the type of product. So if you're doing a monster manual, you know you need basically one art per monster. depending on your budget, what you can pull off. But that's sort of what you'd like to have. And so in that case, you actually need really strict control over the word count.
All monsters are one page or a half page, whatever your standard is, or you set it up. Here are the list of monsters, and this is how many pages we're budgeting for each. And the art director needs to get going now to procure all that art because there's so much art that needs to go through all this process. your art director's got to be going just about on day one.
Once you've got that outline of what you're doing, and then the producer must ensure everybody's on track, everybody's keeping to the schedule so that it all comes together.
Now, art will also depend on where on the page or how much of the page is taken up. So if you have a two-column layout,
and you are going to have one half like one quarter of a column or one whole column with a piece of art that art will be made differently than if it was a horizontal half page piece right so yep there's a there taos is holding up sort of a half page horizontal piece uh so you also need to know how many words are going to be on a page especially in an art intensive
a book like a monster book to get it right without having to do a major rewrite. Yep, Tejas is holding up a book with a half-page vertical column piece of art. It's a very interesting process. It's very time consuming.
God bless our directors because they have to work with a lot of different folks and often they're not getting the information they need at the right time because of we terrible editors, designers, developers. Good job. Now, if God bless art directors, God double bless graphic designers and layout people.
because they then take the text and the art and they put it together into a finished product overseeing the look and feel of the book. Or if it's other parts of a project, maybe cards. If you have monster cards that go with your project, if you have a DM screen, they are the ones that are doing the look and the feel, the graphics, and the layout for those things.
It's often a thing where they'll have a piece of art, they'll have the text, they'll lay it out, and they'll realize we have too much or we have too little. And then it has to go back to the producer, who then might send it back to an editor, who might send it back to a developer to add some text or subtract some text, which then means, uh-oh, we're adding more text.
We have to go back now through development, editing, and the whole process. And if you fail to do that, as we have seen in projects and as Teos mentioned earlier, you may run into some difficulties. If something doesn't quite click in the writer's mind, you could get some problematic material.
It is a big, long, especially for, like I'm working on right now, basically two and a half books worth of content that is all over this process, chapter by chapter by chapter by chapter. So yeah, it is a thing. I'm sure I forgot some stuff. Teos, is there anything I didn't cover?
Yeah, I think that's great. I saw your list and I was very impressed. It's really good. This is a topic that Scott Gray and I have been thinking about covering in the future to do a little video on how a book is made. And this touches a lot of this. This is kind of nice. What's my appetite for that?
Yeah. The big problem, the big hurdle is there needs to be somebody overseeing all of this. There needs to be one person. Or if it's multiple people, they have to be very much in sync to make sure everything is coming together text-wise, rules-wise, business-wise, art-wise, layout-wise. or you end up with issues.
So two thoughts that we didn't mention but are pretty critical. One is marketing. And we tend to make fun of marketing, sort of the evil entity and so on. And they do things like, say, you must put your Baldur's Gate and your Avernus Adventure and things like that. It's not without reason, right? It's because, well, we expected this video game to come out way back then.
And so having a tie in at that time would have been so perfect if actually the video game company had hit their schedule and it all had worked out right. Or things that were done around the movie. I heard things about the movie that was an entirely different D&D movie. that they were trying to do tie-ins, but well, let's just go ahead and get this done because it's not gonna work.
So just plans change, but marketing's trying to make the most out of those things, and the more that things are moving around, well, you end up doing things for what later seems like no reason at all. When it's pulled off, it's great, right?
Yeah, or a Kickstarter. You get a Kickstarter, and you have your books planned, and suddenly you do better than you thought, and they add stretch goals. And let's say, for example, for a Grim Hollow revisited Grim Hollow transform project where we did well and we asked the backers, hey, here's a list of five things. You choose what you want.
A certain designer slash developer slash editor slash producer type person might be praying that they choose this one thing because you already have that done and it fits well in the book. But no, the players choose something else, which... Hide the results. You chose this thing.
Good job.
Yeah. No, our marketing team is honest and they did the... They voted the way that was the hardest.
The other one here is that usually there's somebody at a very large company that's in charge of the whole print and distribution shipping type thing. And so if you think about there's a release date, whether it's a Kickstarter date or it's a two stores date or whatever, and the bigger you are, I mean, Wizards has to deal with this. And it's a nightmare, right?
Trying to get that many books printed and stuff. You need special agreements with very special printers and multiple points of entry in multiple countries even. But even at a smaller level, that timing, that's a real challenge. And so somebody who knows, okay, you're going to get me these print file ready at this date so that I can get it to the shipper. The shipper is ready to print.
They'll save us that window. It all come out. That is a very tough job, too, because, of course, you know, everybody's going to want to say, I'm sure they can find another date. No. Right. And then the things like, well, if we wait too long, the price of shipping changes and our whole profit margin shifts and any number of things like that.
And so those people are all hugely important as well in the scheme of things.
I learned the importance of Lunar New Year a couple years ago and how that affects shipping and Kickstarters and production. Yeah. Simon at Ghostfire is our production manager who handles the cards and the minis and all the knickknacks and all the great stuff. He's
he's uh also god bless uh those folks so and sean it is the year of the snake so watch out for cobra command that's all i'm saying i i always do uh speaking of interesting npcs graham ward via our patreon discord asks what are some good resources and methods for infusing interesting npcs and social interaction if you're not running a published adventure or you're running one that doesn't support that aspect of play
For me, the key term there are interesting NPCs and social interaction, because that's dependent really on the game you're playing, the story that you're telling in the game, and then the experience you want to promote at the table. So therefore, I started thinking about resources. I'm like, well, that resource might work if you're running like a sword and sorcery sort of game.
But if you're running Knights Black Agents or Top Secret or Spycraft, that's a whole different sort of, you have different resources. So what I have figured is I figure out what experience do I want, what game am I trying to play, what game elements do I want to highlight, and then experience and what story is coming out of those game elements and the experience.
So for experience, before I look for resources, I ask myself, do I want the players in this social interaction with these NPCs, do I want them to think? Do I want them to act, as in acting? Do I want them to talk? And then I will look for the resources that will do those things. So if I'm running a Super Spy game, my resources are going to watch James Bond, John le Carre, the Bourne movies.
I'm doing that. Mission Impossible. That's where the story is, and that's where I can take a cue of the experience that the players will have and what I want to bring out in that game. Uh, if it was, if it was a fantasy thing, I might go Conan and right. Game of Thrones.
And if I have a sort of darker, more intriguing type and just work from those resources, because those are the experience that the players have. And so that's where, rather than going. in a more, even for me this is hard to say, a more academic route, I'm just going straight to the story and pulling stuff from there.
I think you're on to the right of it. What I find is most useful at the table when I'm coming up with an NPC is separating whether this is a main NPC that they need to deal with a lot, like it's going to come up often. Or is this just sort of like a fun burst of something, right? The interesting villager, the quirky person at the tavern, something like that.
And to me, that's two different modes because the more quirky gimmicky fun, you know, that's more of a flashpan experience, flash in the pan. And so you just want to have something that captures imagination and is interesting. And you can still go to the same places, but you're doing it a little differently.
So you can pull someone from a movie or something like that or a novel, and that can be good inspiration. But you really are just sort of trying to create something that they will play off of. And so really what I'm doing with that method-wise is thinking of what's needed for the scene to facilitate, to interact between players and the scene, right?
In this tavern, they need to accomplish the following things, right? They need to pick up these two clues. So what is an NPC that can be fun to interact with that can help them get towards those clues, but only when they interact? Right. So and what's the type of interaction?
Well, the interaction has to be around, you know, what the sea is like this time of year and what dangers are there and who knows what else. Right. And some demand of the players. And so that kind of back and forth. That's the method that I'm using of making it interesting and fun and quirky.
The more that an NPC is going to be around, then I need, especially across sessions, I need to be able to track it. And that's where it's really easy to do something I've always done for years, but is also in Mike Shea's advice, is that idea of taking something from a novel TV show, whatever, and changing it in some way or mashing it or pulling an aspect and then into whatever your NPC vision is,
And so it's things like, you know, the the like, like I played a character recently, but it could have been a non-player character that was based on Ho from Slow Horses. Right. This like super into himself thinks he's just the gift to God's gift to everybody, not just women. And, you know, above the fray and just and so having Being able to understand who they are, right?
That's my method is find something that helps you do to really understand who they are so that across the sessions you can keep doing that. Even if the minor bits, you might not quite always get your accent or your quotes right. You know, you can do a lot of techniques around that too, but you know who they are. You understand who they are, their motives, their goals, their way of operating.
And resource-wise, one thing that I find is very helpful is things like Paizo has the Harrow deck, Blade Runner has cards that are included in the intro adventures, but a picture of your NPC goes a long way. Shadowrun had great NPC contacts in their books that you could use these really neat...
That also helps you, too, because the mental image, depending on how your brain works, but at least for me, that mental image really helps me remember who this person is and who I'm portraying to the characters and players. And the players see that visually as well. Right. It's this grimy fixer that's always in their shop, you know, tinkering with stuff. Right.
And seeing the art that kind of shows that just sells itself. Right.
Yeah. One thing I did when I was trying to answer this question was I went to the internet and I googled 100 character archetypes just to see what resources were out there. This was on the first page. 201, 77, 99, D100, 100, over 325, 250, 230, or 50 character archetypes for the following. Screenplays, writers, screenwriters, novelists, writers, right?
So you can go out, you could just do that, go to any one of those websites and you're going to see at least 50 and up to 325 character archetypes, which you could grab or mashed together. And, you know, yeah, it's a resource.
I want to think kind of peer into my brain of how I approach NPCs and scenes can take a look at Acquisitions Incorporated. The chapter, I think it's
three to three or four of the adventure where you go to luskin and i have a couple of scenes there with npcs and you can really see how i approach it through the design that we did there um especially when you go to the tavern that you need to get some clues in that tavern and you can see the the sort of bizarre type of characters i do that are more of that flash in the pan approach
that are meant to be interesting, right? You know, you're missing a finger and here's the stuff you're saying. And even the guy at the door is like the guard is a bumbling fool. You can easily talk into giving you information, right? It's those kinds of that's what I look for and what I tend to do.
Yep.
So thank you for those questions. We will have more next time. Jumping right into news and commentary, let's start with no news being good news regarding the D&D movie and television show. We had Jess Lanzillo commenting on the possibility of more D&D movies, shows, and other media with EN World's Christian Hoffer. And by the way, Christian going to EN World is amazing.
EN World has never been better in terms of reporting and getting in-depth, accurate information. So excellent hire there, and good job, Christian, and everyone working there.
Whatever he's getting paid, double it.
Yep. What Jess said was after I joined the D&D team at the end of quarter one, 2024, we kind of reestablished our relationship with a lot of studios and partners. And we're doing a lot of exploration.
We basically have aligned our philosophy so we want to pair up with the best creators and let them tell the best stories that they already know how to do because all of these people started telling stories through playing D&D. And through that, there are a series of explorations that we are very, very excited about. When we are ready to announce them, we will let you know.
There's a lot of potential there in what she is saying.
Yeah. We see the cyclical nature of this, right? We, Hasbro, are going to buy an entertainment studio and we're going to make movies and TV shows because we're going to make so much money with that. And then the D&D movie comes out. great directorial team, great writing, great acting. Everything about it, fantastic. I could watch it again right now.
I don't think they could have done better on getting that movie out. And still, it didn't explode like they were hoping. What happens...
I mean, I was just seeing our friend who's always covering the D&D movie was saying that
it it may now fall out of being in the top 10 in a country in in like its last country it almost made it two entire years of being in the top 10 and streaming or you know something somewhere and it's done really well like i know it didn't do the box office they wanted at the time when no other movie was also doing the box office it wanted so you know but it's
I'll tell you what drives me nuts, Sean, is that what I'm hearing is, oh, we're going to license out any D&D movies or TV shows. Yeah. And the reason we didn't have a good D&D movie for such a long time is
was because they had given it the license to a company that then gave it to another company and that company was either going to sit on it forever or as it started losing the ability to hold on to his license was going to make the worst cheapest dnd movie possible just to renew the license and hasbro had to sue slash give money to this entity and i think it was like part of cbs or something i can't even remember we'd have to go back and look at our show notes but
They had to sue and pay off this group to get the license back so that then something like five or six years could go by and we could end up with a movie we got. It's such a long, torturous process. And we're just starting the cycle all over again. So I hope they learn from those previous mistakes. It's fine to go back to licensing. But boy, you know, you need that and get it out there. Right.
Because. What I do know is the D&D movie was great for getting the brand name out there. Did you make money on the movie itself? You know, I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. Probably used it as a way to sock in losses and it was great for you anyway. But please make another. Don't wait forever, right?
Right. Well, and that's what I was going to continue. Sorry. No, but they went off and they made, you know, with partners, obviously, but they made the movie.
Yeah.
Thinking we will reap most of the benefits and didn't. but they partnered with a computer game company and had a smash success. So with that smash success and with the failure of the movie over here, failure in quotes, they're like, oh, now we're going to switch. Now we're going to license out movies, but we're going to make video games. And what's likely to happen?
Likely, some licensed TV show, movie, entertainment thing will do great again. And all the video games they put out will underperform. And then they'll say, oh, wait, look, we could be making... And then they'll switch. And that's just the cycle that this whole industry... you know, it perpetuates.
It's so beautiful to watch the sausage being made.
Right. And I'm completely cool with what Jess says here. You never can predict the future, so you just try to find the best plan with the best partners that you can and hope for the best. Any other thoughts on that bit of news there?
just tagging into the idea of licensing and games and things there was a Wizards of the Coast shared an upcoming game called Battle Maked or Marked Battle Marked and typo in my show notes thank you which uses the Demeo system for creating a cross platform online tabletop
kind of gaming experience you and your buddies show up as tokens on this map it's all kind of 3d ish and glowing kind of pretty dungeon looking map and you can go over to the chest and you get cards in it and those cards give you powers and you roll special dice to come up with things and so they're doing a dnd version of that uh there was a trailer about it you can check it out uh we'll see how that does but you know just another example of sort of
somebody has a system, they're doing games, and they want the D&D name for it, sure, you can get that licensed.
There you go. We'll talk more about licensed games next week, but now we want to talk about Wizards of the Coast announcing two new 2025 books while we blinked and missed it. They announced first Eberron Forge of the Artificer in August of 2025,
which will include the revised Artificer class, new backgrounds and feats, a new revised Eberron species, including the Changeling, Kalashtar, Warforged, and Shifter, along with the new Korovar species, which are considered new species and distinct from half-elves, which I assume referred to what they sort of were in previous iterations of the game.
And Crawford had an explanation of like, you know, looking at the lore, you know, they've said they aren't half elves. And so we, of course, are perfectly capturing this now. And sure, five editions from now, we'll have an entirely different way of looking at it. But, you know, fine. OK, so, you know, one more species that are that are different.
And given that half elves are being pulled out, well, that makes sense to not have them.
That's right. New bastion options for Eberron expanded rules for airships. Wait, wait, wait.
Are we going to see the ship combat that Spelljammer never delivered?
I want to know. Well, hopefully. Dragonmark houses will now be feats and no longer locked into species, opening up memberships that characters can join during their adventuring career. There is no campaign planned as far as we know, but we do get three chapters on Sharn Inquisitives, Dragonmark Intrigue, and Wargrave Expeditions, presented as campaign options with sample adventures.
What else do we know about this, Taz?
they mentioned that they are using the dungeon masters guide organizational approach for adventures and include several sample adventures. And I found that really interesting because I don't know that we've seen the DMGs, you know, kind of half page adventures thing receive amazing praise. Like I think, People have said, yeah, this is great to sort of show what your paper notes might look like.
But is that a format we wanted to see emulated? And this is the first of two products we're being told that this will be the approach to it. And along with this comes the announcement that they're experimenting with a different page count and price point. Sounded like lower. But details were not given.
And so maybe the idea is this is going to be like a much leaner offering, like a mini book, a half book, something like that. And that's why you're not getting adventures. You're getting like outlines of things you could flesh out and run. It's not a bad idea, but it'll be interesting to see how how much that captivates people.
If you look at the Eberron book, it had a bigger page count than more than most books. The original Last War. And it was it's I mean, a lot of people say it's one of the best setting books fifth edition has had because it has so much coverage to it from an adventure experience to the setting, to the player side, all of that.
The team will include James Wyatt, who worked on the original Eberron line, and the original Eberron designer, Keith Baker, will be consulting on the new book, whatever that means. So there's book one. Book two, we have a little less information on. It is coming in October, and it is simply called The Unnamed Mystery Book. I assume that means it has mysteries in it.
Not that it is a mystery in and of itself, although it is a mystery in and of itself. Yeah. So we will keep an eye and our ear to the ground for any information on that. Now just a quick reminder of what else is coming out in 2025. In July we have Dragon Delves, 10 short adventure anthologies, each tied to a different chromatic or metallic dragon.
We have September bringing us Heroes of the Borderlands Starter Set, set in the Keep on the Borderlands world, but after time has passed.
Yeah. And can I just do things? The Dragon Delves is also using this 2024 DMG approach of short type prep style adventures. So that's kind of fascinating there for these 10 short anthologies that they're not like full fledged adventures, apparently. Also, they're doing an art style of each anthology has its own art style. I think that's a neat idea.
For this Heroes of the Borderlands set, they're playing with components and trying to, I think, sell you on the components that are in it. So like tiles that you mix and match to create characters, which is an idea we've bandied about on the show.
Like if you have a pre-gen and you have, you know, insert either block A or block B for your skills and insert block C or D for your, you know, choice of subclass or whatever, right? And so they're saying this is the quickest character creation system ever for new players. So we'll see how that goes.
That is needed, so I hope that works well. We have two books in November, both set in the Forgotten Realms, the Forgotten Realms Player's Guide and the Forgotten Realms Adventure Guide. The Player's Guide will include new ways to cast spells, new subclasses.
In fact, they are likely going to have subclasses that we are going to talk about in our main segment today as we look at the Unearthed Arcana. The Forgotten Realms Adventures Guide will focus on five regions of the realms, the Moonshade Isles, Icewind Dale, the Dale Lands, Kalimshan, and Baldur's Gate.
There will be short adventures for DMs to run or help launch a campaign in each of the other areas, and some of the areas have been updated with new information according to what we've heard. Yeah. So any other news you want to delve into?
Yeah, just the GeekWire, Polygon and Screen Rant all had articles. GeekWire had some interesting pieces there where it talked about how now that sort of Jeremy Crawford has a slightly, I think, elevated role and Perkins shifts over to sort of world creation and that this allows them to reestablish a world building environment with the idea that they could create new settings.
So that'll be interesting to see whether that comes out. And it wasn't just necessarily settings, but sort of new experiences, new, you know, beyond the idea of revisiting the past and having like an old setting book or something like that. They talked about bringing in Baldur's Gate three aspects to that Baldur's Gate section of the adventure guide. But also they were saying that.
All of the experience of Baldur's Gate 3 and appeal of it was, according to Jeremy Crawford, brought in as the idea of having micro settings, various disparate locations that are still technically on the same world, which are different enough to serve as the home for entirely different styles of the D&D game.
And this apparently came from the reactions to Baldur's Gate 3, which I thought was really interesting. Awesome. The virtual tabletop came up. Do we want to just quickly touch on that? Go for it. All right. So GeekWire talked about how Sigil has been a little quiet, but that they did get to test it, look at it. And there are a couple of things that I thought were interesting here.
They said is intended as many things, a world building tool, a visual aid, a hook for your imagination. But according to Cale Stutzman, the director of the game, it isn't necessarily a virtual tabletop. And that they quietly tested it at a recent PAX Unplugged. And there that people said... The more that it tried to automate Dungeons and Dragons, the less people seem to like it.
That influenced an evolution of the tool from a sort of virtual D&D companion into an easy to use 3D map builder. So I thought there's a little bit more here that folks can read in our show notes if you're a Patreon supporter. But that to me is interesting. I felt like maybe the fact that it's being a little quiet, it involves a shift in approach. And this seems to suggest that's true.
So it'll be interesting to see where that goes.
We'll definitely keep an eye on that, especially as they partner with other virtual tabletop apps and so on. Do you want to talk about this providing new settings?
We kind of touched on that, but but very quickly that they do seem to suggest that there will be new campaign settings coming out because of the way that they've changed up. Jeremy Crawford being game director and Chris Perkins, creative director. But it's interesting to me that this seems to be a big push on their end, right?
There's something going on here within Wizards, reading between the various quotes and lines. Something's going on with their idea of how they envision settings and what will be built in the future.
And so I wonder if it's something a little more like we saw with that video game that has its own role playing game, whether they're going to try to do some sort of tie ins and larger things that that will be new, but maybe cross media in some way. So it'll be interesting to see what comes from here. There's going to be something different than just saying like, oh, we made the next Eberron, right?
It feels like there's something beyond that coming here. I also note that there are new... Pause and step back, Sean. I was not expecting that the week that the Monster Manual is in gaming stores... All this news would distract from the Monster Manual. Like you and I would have been talking about the Monster Manual. And we're talking about all this.
Shouldn't they have waited at least one more week? But yeah, the other thing they said was there's a new Fallbacks novel. I really enjoyed reading the first one. A copy was provided to me, but it was absolutely great. I've given it on to someone to enjoy with their family. So there's going to be another one. I look forward to it.
I think that could be the basis of a great TV show or movie if they wanted to make something that has wide appeal. Really nice set of characters there.
We talked briefly a while ago about Universal FanFest nights having a D&D themed night. And now you can buy tickets. The official page is up at UniversalStudiosHollywood.com. The Universal FanFest D&D nights will run from April 25th through May 18th. And so you can check out, link in the show notes to see what's going on with all of that.
Jumping quickly to our creator corner, we're starting with Ethan Yen launching the game prequel. Yeah. So you are the first group of heroes that have reached the evil that rules over the realm. The quest was difficult and full of sacrifice. Despite all this, victory will not meet you. However, the heroes who come after you may still have a chance, provided you can pave the way.
So what do you do in this game? You fail. But you are not the end. So you fight the evil in a multi-phase tactical boss fight. You can world build as you fight, constructing a timeline of the hero's quest. And you forge your legacy by discovering the evil's weaknesses and the hero's burdens. It's perfect for a one-shot or an introduction to a D&D campaign that you are about to run.
Yeah, this is so cool. A number of folks in our Discord played samples of this, I think, at Gamehole and a preview of this and really loved it. And everything Ethan does just seems to be fantastic. I know you've tried out a couple of things and Um, so I absolutely, yeah, yeah. Uh, I am absolutely good. Sean is holding up fetch my blade. Um, so I'm absolutely getting this.
It just sounds really cool. This idea of collaborative, uh, flashback creation and paving the way for the future heroes that are going to come and learning about what you did. That sounds like the kind of thing that can be a really fun evening of gaming. It's only $10 for the PDF 20 for print. Um, yeah, seems amazing.
Indeed. Also amazing is Punching Nazis. And there's a bundle of holding that will let you do that time after time after time through a series of games. That's right. So our listeners shared with us this bundle of holding filled with anti-authoritarian tabletop RPGs. Perfect time to break out one of these games like Apocalypse Frame, Gray Ranks, Misspent Youth, Eat the Reich, and many more.
As usual, the bundle comes at various levels so you can get the best deal for you. As of this recording, you have about a week left to get this bundle at bundleofholding.com slash presents slash resistance.
This next story was one that I was kind of really struck by when I read it. Jared Rasher saying he's hanging up his review hat. And I would absolutely encourage folks to go to whatdoiknowjr.com and read this latest post on Changing Times. He reflects on how he's been writing reviews basically since the 3.5 era onward and how much energy it takes out of him and the mental health.
thinking he's done around this and deciding to kind of step back. So I wish him, I know you do too, just, you know, a lot of recovery. Uh, and, and we give him huge thanks for all of the incredible reviews. I mean, talk about above and beyond just incredible reviews of products covering all kinds of, of areas of, of our hobby and just incredible. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you for all your work, Jared. So insightful. So precise. Uh, so, you know, well-tuned into the gaming world.
Yeah.
And, uh, yeah.
Fantastic.
You, you've, you've, you've earned your peace. And last but not least, listener Sasha Morlock has shared that author Brandon Sanderson has started his professional writing lecture for sci-fi and fantasy novels at BYU. These were recorded back in 2020, but there will be new ones for 2025. What do you know about these lecture status?
Yeah, I haven't checked them out yet, but we really appreciated Sasha reaching out to us via Mastodon with these. And Sasha pointed out that there are three videos up right now. Every Friday, there's a new video. And the second one about promise, progress and payoff, he said, is they said Sasha said is especially useful. So thanks for that tip. That's great.
And these are going to go on my list of things to check out.
There you go. That was a lot of news and a lot of commentary. So on our main topic this week on Mastering Dungeons, we are going to dive into the latest D&D Unearthed Arcana. What, pray tell, could be in this Unearthed Arcana? Well, with the Forgotten Realms books coming out later in 2025, in November, we are starting to see content that will likely or at least may be considered for that book.
This first Unearthed Arcana here is eight new subclasses that are supposed to appear in the Forgotten Realms Player's Guide. These are particularly tied to regions of the realms, like Oath of the Noble Genies, belongs in the Kalimshan region. The College of the Moon, perfectly set in the Moonshade Isles. Or organizations that may spawn a certain type of subclass.
There's a Spellfire Sorcery subclass that goes all the way back to Ed Greenwood's novel Spellfire, which I read way, way along. I was probably a teenager when I read that.
Yeah.
So, you know, we are going to go through these with not a fine tooth comb, but we'll at least discuss most of the major components. And we're not going to get through all eight.
In fact, today's been a long show. We could really just start with maybe two. Maybe we get to three. Let's see how it goes.
That sounds good. But one of the interesting things was the playtest notes at the start of this document that I wanted to sort of dig into. Because I don't know if this is always in the playtest documents, but it's the first time that I actually stopped and took a close look at it. And it's telling in a lot of ways.
It's telling because as someone who has both given feedback during playtests and also received playtest feedback, there are many ways to receive feedback that are helpful. And there are about 20 times the ways to receive feedback that isn't helpful. And so I like what they're saying here, but it's also important enough, I think, to call it out. So it says, this is playtest material.
It's there for playtesting and feedback. They're experimental and in draft form. They aren't officially part of the game, and your feedback will help determine whether we adopt it as official. I think my first question is, if this stuff is just hammered by playtesters, so we hate it, we don't like it, I wonder if they'll leave it out.
Or if they will redesign it in such a way that, yes, we are going to have a knowledge domain cleric. It may not look anything like this, but by gosh, we will have one.
Well, I mean, I've got a thought which goes back to our very first listener question in the previous segment. You've got a schedule to hit. You've got art you're ordering. This book's coming out, what, in November? There's a very short timeline. So my guess is it's you fine tune is it.
and and that's you know i did when you asked that question of whether this is new text i went back and looked at just four recent going back to 2017 because we had a break in an earth arcana four recent documents none of them had exactly this text they had a much shorter block but this block does mimic things that as an inside play tester we've seen variants of that over the years um
one thing that i will say that that disappoints me i heard somebody else say this i forget exactly who it was i'm not going to try to recall but um one thing that disappoints me about their approach to play testing is there's a lot of here's what it is tell us what you think and very few actual questions and that's something that i think they should do right where if they told us do you like this feature better than the 2014 version or would you like feature a or feature b
I think they would learn a lot from that process. It's something that D&D Next did a lot. So maybe it was Mike Morales who was talking about this, but D&D Next really went out and said, here is an option and here's another option. Here's how skills could work or here's how skills could work. Tell us what you think about that. And it feels like the team's never asking us design questions.
They're kind of just hoping we'll give it a five. You know what I mean? Or flag the one thing we are uncertain about, right?
And I think that comes down to time, as you say. It comes down to this will be what it is, but we could tweak it a bit. But part of the reason that it's said that way is often playtesters, and I'm using air quotes because so often playtesters are not actually playing these. Often they are reading them and making assumptions. And it's in the play that the real value lies.
It can totally be true that you could read something and say that will never work. Absolutely. But it's also true that someone could read it and say that will never work when it actually does.
Right.
Or say, oh, that looks great, and then it doesn't.
Yeah.
And so yes, in a perfect world, there would be a three-year run-up where we do get which of these two works best at your table. This works best because it's simpler, says one playtester. This works better because it gives the player lots of complicated choices that they love, says another playtester. And you... You start to see preferences.
You start to see more than just how is this one line of a game. You start to see the preferences that can then move forward to dictate your design, to lead your design.
It would be cool if in the virtual tabletop, they had the ability to test the UA with an adventure and pre-gens.
Yeah.
know that'd be really cool right you could just say here's run this right and because that's another thing i really liked about dnd next is that they would say here's this you know gnome under dark adventure and here are these new rules we're testing and then they would ask those questions and the surveys would say you know how did you like the skill system or whatever but you really were playing i mean i played most of those if not all of the dnd next
uh play test packets or let's say a good number of them because they came with these adventures that you could run through it and see how you felt about it and and as you're saying then you had this real educated mindset where you got oh you know i didn't like how it read but actually it plays pretty well yeah yeah and so it says how to test how to play test this ua
And basically, it's like, play it. Play it either as part of an ongoing campaign or run a special playtest session. Then you can give us your feedback. And they even say use one of the adventures from Quests from the Infinite Staircase to play this.
So they know that you are using something that they created as opposed to something that you created, which could be wildly divergent from other playtest groups. So at least they're moving in that direction to find a... Thinking about it, maybe.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Next is power level. The character options you read here might be more or less powerful than options in 2024 Player's Handbook. If a design survives playtesting, we adjust its power to the desirable level before publication. This means an option could be more or less powerful in its final form.
What they're saying here is, don't tell me, well, this subclass at level 6 does 2d8 damage, while this other playtest, this at level 6, does 3d8 damage. So it's bad. They're saying, we know that everything is not going to be perfect. Power level is the least thing that you should be focusing on. Focus on the fun and the flavor. That's not saying don't delve into the rules.
That's not saying, you know, it's not saying never look at that. But the useless information we get the most is how this thing compares to this thing. And there is no equal.
So that right there is a flawed premise. At the same time, Healing Spring, Silvery Barbs, we see cases where wizards did not comprehend the power level of things. And yet, time and time again, people would bring it up. And until Healing Spring was eroded, you had Jeremy saying, oh, it's perfectly fine on podcasts. Sometimes you should listen a bit on that, right?
But while also that everything you said is true, there are some times when folks should stand up and say, wait a minute, this is going to be a big problem. And Wizards has a very bad track record. This includes D&D Next. It includes fourth edition playtesting.
I've been on any number of internal forums where playtesters were saying this is a really big problem and it comes out exactly as it was in the original version. And it's like, please, sometimes you could listen to us. You know, like sometimes power level is a major impact on the game. Silvery barbs.
You're absolutely correct. And that is the exception that backs up my rule.
Yeah, sure.
Which is if every single thing you're saying is comparing this subclass to this subclass when it's not meant to be equal, then the real things that need to be changed, the real things that need to be fixed get lost in the wash. Yeah.
Well, I'm going to be contrarian guy, Sean, because the next piece they say is, hey, the place to give us feedback is the survey. And to which I go, yes, except Jerry himself, Jeremy himself said on a video, you know, we realized that while the survey was one way, what we kept hearing was the other. And so we knew that people wanted something else.
And so their own internal, your external public communications have said to us that they listen to other places.
And so you have to wonder if I want a particular thing in the game, should I be on social media being loud and visible, which I don't think is what they want, but then they have to write better surveys because if their surveys are not giving the results they want, that's a survey design problem, which wizards has often had an issue with.
So, yes, I do believe the place for feedback is the survey, but the survey needs to be OK with people beating you up. And then you're still going to, at the end of the day, put on your smart designer hat and carve a way forward. But better to ask the tough questions and get that actual feedback. Yep.
Yeah, it's it is a process that is flawed. no matter how hard you work at it. And what you need are very smart designers, very smart playtesters that are closer to the design, and then a good survey which elicits the feedback that you need from the larger group.
But the feedback is always like rate this feature from one to five as a player, as a DM from game balance. What are you asking me? Like, because you might say every attack you hit deals plus 4000 damage and players will go. That's awesome. I'm rating it five. You're preaching to the choir here. We need, and the main way for feedback is this thing.
Well, okay, you know, you're going to get, all right, I'm done. I'm stopping at contrarian. Let's talk about these subclasses, Sean.
Okay, let's jump in. So what we have our new subclasses, as well as updates to existing subclasses in this document. So we go alphabetically. We have the bard, College of the Moon. We have the cleric's knowledge domain. We have the
Paladin's Oath of the Noble Genies, the Ranger's Winter Walker, the Rogue's Scion of the Three, the Sorcerer's Spellfire Sorcery, the Fighter's Purple Dragon Knight, and the Wizard's Blade Singer in this document. So we are going to take them in the order in which they appear, which starts with the Bard's College of the Moon. As the overall feel for this subclass,
It is supposed to trace its origins back to the druidic circles of the Moonshay Isles. Cool. where the bards were entrusted with the tradition of chronicling the stories of the land and its people.
This sort of goes all the way back to 1st edition D&D where to become a bard you had to be a certain number of fighter levels, a certain number of druid levels, a certain number of other levels until I think a thief might have been a couple. And then you were able to become a bard. And this is one of those druid-y... Right around the time the campaign was cancelled.
Yeah, right as soon as the campaign... Yeah, and also the idea of bards as sort of being... dovetailing into a setting because of the role they play for something else that's higher up, like the druids in the Moonshade Isles. But they need their bards who carry the lore, who tell the stories, who interpret what the druids are saying.
And that's a very nice piece that's in the Darkwalker and Moonshade novel series and all of that. But really nice story behind that.
And the Moonshine Isles are near and dear to my heart because the first D&D novel I read was Dark Walker on Moonshine. So that is there. I've worked on the Moonshine Isles campaigns. Did a fourth edition sort of guide to the Moonshine Isles that was fun to work on. So I'm reading this and I'm going, oh, tell me, tell me, tell me. Tell me all about the wonderful Moonshine stuff.
Well, I will tell you about the wonderful Moonshine stuff. What do you get at level three? As a magic action, you can invoke the power of a folktale, imbuing yourself with the primal magic until you use this feature again. So when you use this feature, there are three things that you can do. And they're all sort of reactions based on something else that's happened.
So first is the Tale of Life where you can restore hit points to a creature. When you restore hit points to a creature with a spell, you can expend a bardic inspiration die and increase the amount of hit points restored by a number equal to the roll of that die. And you can only do this once per turn. Okay. So I cast a spell to heal. I add some good. Second thing, Tale of Gloam.
When you use a bonus action to give a creature a bardic inspiration die, you can take the disengage or hide action as part of that bonus action. So, okay, I'm giving you a bardic inspiration die. I can do this thing. And finally, Tale of Mirth. When an enemy you can see within 60 feet of yourself succeeds on a saving throw, you take a reaction to expend a bardic inspiration die.
The creature must then roll the die and subtract that number from the saving throw, possibly causing it to fail. So again, something else happens, I can do this thing. Thoughts?
I'm always a little tentative around these sort of like upfront, make this choice of what form you're in. You know, because it I don't know what adventure is my DM throwing at me. Do I know? Do I really know? Like, this is a little better. I think they've done a decent job here. So a good job, let's say, because Tale of Life, you can say, well, if the party's hurt, I'll swap in.
I'll take a magic action to swap into Tale of Life so that I'm in extra hit point mode restoration. That's cool. But then the Tale of Gloam.
to take disengage or hide that's a little more of like a character build thing it's i'd say it's kind of impossible to know this situation is coming up unless you absolutely know it's a stealth mission uh and then mirth is sort of your most effective most of the time because you can see somebody that succeeds on saving throw and lower it by the number on your die so you could just do that that's kind of your safe one right when in doubt do that
Are these balanced? Is that good to have that choice be in advance? I don't know. What do you think?
I think you hit the nail right on the head here because first of all, it's it's not 100% clear. As a magic action, you can invoke the power So it works until you use this feature again. When you use this feature, choose which of the following folktales you invoke. And at first it's like, well, I could do any of them.
But then I'm like, no, wait, it says you have to use a magic action to choose one of the following. So it's not just a reaction to do one. It's choose one and then hope that it comes up that that is the thing.
Yeah, it's a little video game, right? You are in tale of life mode now. And so now whenever you... This trigger happens. Now you can only do this, but you can't do the other. You can't do Tale of Gloam or Tale of Mirth. And that means the player must understand the type of adventure or setting situation expected to know which to choose, right? And sometimes that'll work.
Like, you know, yeah, either you're playing a very roguey kind of build and so disengaging and hiding is something you want. Mm-hmm. but it's, it's a little, it's a, it's, or you know that this is a stealth thing, but if it's a stealth thing and I'm giving an inspiration die, do I really need to disengage and hide? That would be helpful in combat.
But if in combat, is it really helpful for the bar to disengage or hide?
Yeah, it's just, it, it,
It's one of those things where your first response as a designer or a player or a game master might be, well, make it a reaction and let them use any of them.
Yeah.
That way it's not the feel bad of, oh, I chose Tale of Life and now I need to hide. Oh, that's just I had the wrong word.
Everybody's heard, but I'm in Tale of Mirth mode, so now I really need to spend a whole action just to switch. Should I do that?
And then, right. But if you do make it a reaction where they could choose any of these three, now you have a third level character where in addition to all of the other things that you can do, you're trying to keep in mind, okay, if I do this, if I heal somebody, do this. If I give inspiration, do this. If I'm casting a spell, or not even casting a spell, when an enemy is going to be
Then I do this. And so that's too many choices for me.
Yes, because then you're locked down every time you're doing something. Yeah.
And what it ends up being is. Tale of Gloam we'll probably never use, so let's forget about that completely. Tale of Mirth would be the one that I will always have on during a combat. And then after combat is done, I will turn off Tale of Mirth and turn on Tale of Life because I'm going to start healing people. Yeah, exactly.
And so it turns into this, well, just take the one that's most powerful. And if you get to that point, you may as well just do those things rather than make it this huge choice.
Yeah, that's where I tend to fall. I would rework this. That would be my counsel. It would be to rework this to either make it simple things you can choose from under a comment situation, like when you roll your barding inspiration die, you choose one of these three things. Or the modes have to be super equal. Like if each mode was types of skills... Or something else like that.
And it felt really you could really even them up to where you wouldn't know which one is better and they're all going to help you out. Then that might make sense. But but yeah, I don't know. I would probably just do what you're talking about.
Yeah. So there's the first third-level feat. The second third-level feat is primal lorist, which is you learn the druidic language and one cantrip from the druid spell list, which counts as a bard spell for you, doesn't count against the cantrips known, and you can choose to become proficient in one of the druidy sort of skills like animal handling, medicine, nature, so on. Okay, cool.
The second third-level thing makes sense to do that. Level six feature is Blessing of the Moon Wells. You always have the Moonbeam spell prepared. And then as a bonus action, you can cast Moonbeam without expending a spell slot. You can only do that once per long rest. So you can always cast it. But casting it in this way as a bonus action without expending a spell slot gives it a special feature.
And then you can reset that ability by using a third level or higher spell slot, no action required. So what's this extra bonus thing that you can do? When you cast the Moonbeam, you begin to glow faintly while concentrating on the spell. It is a spell that lasts one minute, and it's a concentration spell.
During that time, if a creature fails its saving throw against the effects of the Moonbeam spell, a different creature of your choice that you can see within 60 feet regains 2d4 hit points. Cool. Yeah. So overall, I actually like this sort of thing. I like this thing where you can take a relatively powerful ability, spell something,
feature and add to it and make it more useful because it cuts down on the choices you need to make. There is an optimal thing that you can do and have fun with and make it well, if that makes sense.
Yeah, it does. And I mean, I love a number of things about it. I love that it's because Moonbeam is one of these spells that's like an in-between spell. It's 2d10 radiant as a second level, which is not amazing.
and it's a tall cylinder but five foot radius so it's hard to get multiple targets and it's concentration so it's one of the spells that it can be great but you know um and this making it a bonus action to begin with makes it like oh sweet and then this healing on top of it that's fun i dig it yeah
And the interesting part is the moonbeam spell, you cast it, and then you can move it around. So you can move it to a creature on your turn, and that will make it make another saving throw or take the damage. other creatures can push now even more easily than 2024 creatures into it. Forcing it to make a save once per turn. So it adds an element of... Tactics and camaraderie.
But very doesn't take a lot. It's like, oh, you pushed them in, another save. Oh, you pushed it in, another save. And the only thing that I would change is the 2d4. At third level, okay, five points of healing. Now you get up to 15th level, you upcast this spell maybe. Maybe you can. It doesn't say you can upcast it.
Yeah, so you would need a way to make it usable, as usable at 15th level as it is at 6th. So be able to upcast it and be able to heal more with it. Because otherwise, after about, well, 7th, 8th level, you're not using it anymore.
And that's true of Moonbeam itself, is if you're not upcasting Moonbeam, then that 2d10 isn't as strong, but could be worth it with this. The problem is, of course, the default one is not going to be upcast, and so it's where you're going to spend a spell slot. They do let you spend a higher spell slot. It'd be cool if spending the higher spell slot also upcasts the Moonbeam,
and maybe increase the healing by another D4, and that would be really cool.
But overall, it's great.
I'd rate it a 1 because it's not broken. Just kidding.
Yes. So I'm cool with that, and I love to see that sort of thing. Level 14 is Blessed Folktales. So this adds on to the third level Moonshade Folktales, Tales of Life, Gloam, and Mirth. what does it add? For the two, Tales of Life and Tales of Mirth, instead of expending your die, you can just roll a d6 and use that number instead of expending your bardic inspiration die.
So you are saving that die, essentially. That's great. Mm-hmm. And for Gloam, in addition to being able to, as part of that bonus action, hide or was it disengage? Yeah, disengage or hide, yeah. You can teleport yourself up to 30 feet as part of that bonus action. So, it gives a little more oomph to that. And I'm cool with that. I actually like those things that
rather than giving you more choices, just make the one thing that you can do or the couple things you can do, make them cooler or more useful.
Yeah, I wonder if actually that could be something... if this almost could be what you could do for the earlier level of something like, you know, if one of them was a chance that would, you know, roll a die when you do bardic inspiration and maybe you don't expend it.
Or when you use bardic inspiration, you can teleport 10 feet and then later it becomes 30 feet or something like that that's a little more reliable and more helpful more of the time, right? That it's not so scenario dependent. That could be really neat. I don't know. Yeah, interesting. But I like what they're going with here, generally, like the teleport 30 feet would be really sweet.
That makes it a lot more applicable. It's almost like at this point it became really useful, but now it's level 14 and we're, you know, mostly done with our careers or way past where careers often end, you know, statistically speaking.
Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, you still have to design, even if no one will ever use it. OK, so that that was the that was the Bard College of the Moon and Taos is going to be your knowledgeable guide. All right. Knowledge domain cleric subclass.
Yeah, I'll break open my notes here. The cleric knowledge domain. I was when I saw the name, I was like, wait, that sounds familiar. And then I didn't even see the sidebar when looked in the player's handbook 2014. Sure enough, it's there. And then I came back and there's a sidebar telling you what's changed. But It has a similar focus as one would expect to the knowledge domain in 2014.
So this is one of those things where we did hear folks say like, hey, we're only going to have X subclasses per class in 2024, but you may see them show up again. Well, here we are. And the focus is similar. It's a bit stronger. So level three, before you got two skills from a list and you got two languages, now you get two tools instead of two languages. So very similar.
uh there used to be something that when you you uh you could for 10 minutes gain a skill uh or tool that you had proficiency in now instead as a magic action you can expend one use of your channel divinity to manifest your magical knowledge choose a spell from the knowledge domain spells table if prepared as part of that action you can cast that spell without expending a spell slot needing material components
that's cool except now you've got to look up all the knowledge domain spells i guess they're not that many but yeah so because it's one of these subclass so that's fine yeah i guess that's reasonable um it's a short reasonably short list i guess so like at third level it's command comprehend languages detect magic thoughts identify and mind spike so you could
Choose one of those and cast it with your channel divinity.
Okay.
What do you think?
I think that past about third level, adventures, as they are designed both by game masters and by game designers, are done in such a way that you rarely run out of spell slots.
True.
Saving a spell slot doesn't do a heck of a lot for me when you probably have some channel divinity, some other way to use your channel divinity that might be better. So I would rather see it like we had with Moonbeam where you can cast it without a thing and blank.
And something cool happens. Yeah.
Right.
Yeah. Yeah, that would be neat. No, you're right. It is amazing how hard it is for casters to run out of spell slots in 5th edition. And the level six ability is to have telepathy in a 60 foot distance and something kind of cool. You can contact a number of creatures equal to your wisdom modifier. So it's sort of a miniature various telepathic bond.
And if you if your total for an intelligent check is lower than your wisdom score, you can use that score in place of the total. So your wisdom score instead of so it's sort of like your wisdom is covering your intelligence weakness. So make that your dump stack. This replaces the older ability to read thoughts. And then at the end of that, you could sort of end read thoughts to do suggestions.
So sort of like a multistage suggestion spell without expending a slot. I like the various telepathic bond kind of. I always think that's a really neat ability to have. What do you think, Sean?
I am of two minds about these things that let you communicate telepathically, especially with other characters. Because unless you make it an important part of your game that you can't communicate, players can just talk to each other. And often they do, and it becomes... sort of a tedious job as a DM to say, well, you don't know that.
Or you don't know what he was doing on the other side of that wall. So you can't run around the corner to save him, her, them, because you didn't know what was going on. It becomes tedious to do that over and over and over again. And unless players police themselves, Whether it's a home campaign or a pickup game or a convention game, it's something that's always in play.
It's like the helm of self-telepathy, where you get to know what you're thinking. You just always know what you're thinking.
One thing that's a problem is 60 feet, to me, is a very short range. That's what's nice about raised telepathic bounds. You can stop worrying about the distance. 60 feet is, to me, way too short. I'd rather this be something like at least 120, but something big, right? Cover the immediate... being in a building, being in a sector of a dungeon like that should be covered.
Otherwise, what's the point? We'll always stick together. And one of the nice things I like about telepathy, two things. One is it can help you spread out and do things and stay in touch and experience things. So you can run it all without having to say, you guys don't know that, right? So I love that a lot.
And then the other thing is it doubles as a comprehend language, tongues kind of thing, because you now can... we, none of, no one understands what the blah, blah, blah is saying. Hold on. Let me use unfettered mind. Now we can all talk to it. Right. And that's really cool too. Or we, a number of us can speak to it and that's really useful. So, so I, I think it can, it can do a lot here.
That's neat. Um, no, I don't know. I, I, I would tend to think because this is knowledge domain, I liked what they were trying to do with the read thoughts and suggestion. Um, And I always wish that D&D felt a little more comfortable doing things like saying, like, you can ask the DM for a clue, you know, about this. But I think just the game doesn't trust that this will be used well.
But it's what I wish were kind of here.
Yeah. I want to switch over to this. If your total for an intelligence check is lower than your wisdom score, you should wisdom score it. I dislike gating information behind an intelligence check for the reasons that we've talked about forever. The history check, I want you to know. The investigation check, I want you to find the clue. So part of me is like, okay, cool.
But part of me is like, when I do want it to be a check, when I do want there to be some sort of mystery, I don't want, at sixth level, the knowledge cleric to just say, I have an 18 in nature, arcana, investigation. I have an 18, so tell me everything. Or a 20, maybe a couple levels past that.
yeah yeah um yeah and your wisdom score is going to be a pretty darn strong floor yeah um i wonder if you know would would how would it work if you had something a little more like if you make a check to gain some knowledge and you fail you know once per day you can turn it into a success i
I would even go higher than that. I would go proficiency bonus types. Because like I said, I want them to be able to do that. I want them to find the things. I want them to know the things. But I can also, like I said, I can also envision that I want this to be tough. I want this to, there's a huge clue here that if they get, it sort of bypasses things.
Yeah. And so then you want it to be really rare and exceptional, but then that's the rare and exceptional thing is that they're saying I can do this, but, but that's where I do. I do have a problem with the always on nature of this. Like the idea that your intelligence check is always, uh, you know, an 18, for example, that's, Now, it never matters what the intelligence check is.
They'll probably make it unless it's such a high check.
Because then what you get is the, oh, we're traveling through the forest and I'm going to study everything. So no, I'm not perceiving. I'm not searching. I am studying. So let me roll my intelligence check. Yeah.
Yeah. I'll make an investigation check always for the entire party because we know we're getting an 18 and then the road can roll on top of that or whatever. But, you know, we'll just always have this. Yeah. Yeah. I don't I don't love the always this way. I'd rather it be kind of clutch situational stuff. Yeah. And maybe focused on specifically trying to learn things or, you know,
Or maybe just step even away from intelligence and just say that when you're trying to get information from a person, read a person, these kinds of situations where that feels like knowledge that you could choose, you could succeed. I think that'd be cool. Yeah. Level 17, if you get there, as a bonus action, this is called Divine Foreknowledge.
As a bonus action, you magically expand your mind to the possibilities of the future, Sean. Not the future Sean. For one hour, you have advantage on D20 tests. Once you use this feature, you can't use it again until you finish a long rest, but you can burn a level six plus spell slot and then you could get it back. So an hour worth of advantage on D20 tests.
This replaces the ability to read objects or an area to see events in the past around them, which actually like the creativity a lot as a DM of what that did. So, you know, I want to know what this object, the past of this object or who was in this room, which can, of course, spoil the murder somewhat. But I mean, you had some interpretation in it. What do you think about divine foreknowledge?
I'm fine with it. Lyrics rolling D20s. I, yeah, okay, they have advantage. I'm good with that. At 17th level, if you don't have advantage on every roll anyway, you're probably doing something wrong. So, sure, take that advantage. Yeah.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
It's not like there's the fun, flavorful, and effing balanced. This is probably balanced enough. As a cleric, it's not a huge deal. Right. I don't know if... I mean, it's fun to always roll with advantage, I guess. Flavorful, yeah, I could see it. It's not one of those, wow, oh, cool. It's like, okay. For certain characters, this is going to be great.
For other characters, it's going to be... Oh, I didn't have advantage already from these seven other things? Okay, I have advantage. Cool. Go ahead. Well, what do you think? Should we stop there? I think that is a good place to shut this puppy down. Yeah. Down with puppies, says Sean. Yes, no more puppies. But... Listeners, puppies are fine, but give me listeners any day.
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I've been doing all the videos. I did a silly unboxing, revealing the deep, dark secrets, the truth behind the Monster Manual. I broke down the math of the Monster Manual. Then I had my big takeaways video just came out today. So you can find that all on my AlphaStream YouTube channel or go to AlphaStream.org and find everything there. Sean, what are you doing when you're writing all the books?
Where do we find you and bug you?
You find me now like once every two weeks at Sean Merwin on social media. You can follow us on YouTube, as we said before. You can join our Patreon. You can email us at masteringdnd at gmail.com. Or just shout really loud. And if you're going to be at Winter Fantasy, come say hi. Yeah. Awesome. We've done that, Teos. We've done it. We've gotten through another show. What are we going to do now?
I'm going to go down and try to establish telepathy with my family.
Yeah, yeah. For sure. That's not bad. I'm going to go find future Sean and see if he's finished the work I need to do yet. Well, that's a win. Yeah.